Chasing the Rain
My Treasure Hunt for the World's Most Beautiful Mushrooms

Taylor F. Lockwood

Chasing the Rain is the fruit of Taylor Lockwood's travels in search of the world's most beautiful mushrooms. Through pictures, it relates the diversity of life-forms found in this very large, but still relatively little-known kingdom. Chasing the Rain tells the stories behind those pictures, shows us ones not yet published, and reveals something new.

Taylor's anecdotes on photographing mushrooms in various climes and conditions chronicle the connections between people who hunt mushrooms all over the world. Developing friendships with colleagues and fellow mushroom enthusiasts around the globe has afforded Taylor a unique perspective on people, travel, and nature-from the ground up. With fungi as the common denominator, barriers of language, culture, and politics are erased.

This gorgeous book details Taylor's travels in search of exotic mushrooms in Europe, Australia, Africa, Japan, China, Indonesia, India and Tibet, as well as North America. Through his lens, we are taken on a gentle journey that is sometimes exciting, often funny, and always close to the earth.

“Taylor is the Jacques Cousteau of mycology.”
- Roy Reehil, Publisher, Forager Press

128 pages, 9-¼" X 10-¾", full-color dust jacket on cloth binding, over 500 full-color photographs, general index, index of species, 2007. Published by Taylor F. Lockwood Publishing.
ISBN 978-0-9709449-2- 4 clothbound

$29.95

Chasing the Rain; My Treasure Hunt for the World's Most Beautiful Mushrooms Taylor F. Lockwood inside image

“Wherever he goes — from the Amazon to Tibet, from New Zealand to Nigeria, from the fringe of urban parking lots to remote nature sanctuaries — Taylor Lockwood brings back the most welcome and most ancient of news: that the world is rich in miraculous beauty that will astound the mind as well as dazzle the eyes. Taylor bears a great gift from the kingdom of fungi directly to the human spirit, a gift that nourishes and inspires our love for the diversity of the world.”
- Malcolm Margolin, Publisher, Heyday Books

“Taylor Lockwood has been obsessed at least as long as I've known him, since the '60s, when we lived on a commune together and he practiced the fiddle six to eight hours a day. Now he's focused that drive on the magical, exotic and alluring realm of mushrooms. He's traveled the world, crawling through muck on hands and knees and returns to the safe old life the rest of us have crafted, with stunning photographs and tales of the most astounding organisms in nature. If you ever have a need to be reminded of the glory, staggering beauty, diversity, and holiness of the world we live in, pick up this book and revel in what Taylor has brought to share with us.”
- Peter Coyote, actor/writer

“A very special blend of travelogue and horticultural study, Chasing the Rain: My Treasure Hunt for the World's Most Beautiful Mushrooms by Taylor F. Lockwood is beautifully illustrated throughout with the author's simply gorgeous, full-color photography of an astonishing variety of mushrooms. The text offers fascinating and informative anecdotes about everything from having to dodge deadly snakes in China, to warding off swarms of mosquitoes in Borneo, to outsmarting a band of monkeys in Bali, to hunting for mushrooms at 14,000 feet in Tibet's thin air, to the difficulties of finding mushrooms in drought-stricken Europe. The culmination (to date) of his passionate appreciation for mushrooms and other fungi, Chasing the Rain is also an account of the connection felt by people who, like esthetic mycologist Taylor Lockwood, hunt the mushrooms of the world. A joy to page through and a highly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library collections, Chasing the Rain is as entertaining as it is informative.“
- James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review